“We had received clear testimony from C.I.A. people that they have deliberately done things to provoke an overreaction on the part of the Government in Nicaragua,” Senator Jim Wright, a Texas Democrat, said today in response to a question at his daily news briefing.

It is the first time that a Government official has publicly acknowledged the CIA activity in Nicaragua. But Wright gave no details regarding the timing of this operation.

The Sandinistas have repeatedly charged that the C.I.A. has tried to destabilize their Government since the beginning of the Reagan administration.

According to Congressional committees investigating the Iran-contra affair, Oliver L. North, a former National Security Council aide, used money raised from the Iran arms sales to fund, at least partially, the C.I.A.’s program supporting anti-Sandinista politicians and supplying weapons to the Contras.

Back to the Present (2008)

The forthcoming Criminal Justice and Licensing Bill of the Scottish Government will include new rules on the disclosure of evidence. The new measures are expected to follow the recommendations in the Coulsfield Report [1].

Paragraphs 6.12 to 6.40 of that report contain Lord Coulsfield’s consideration of the issue of disclosure of sensitive material, public interest immunity (PII) and “special counsel”. Pr. Black has wasted no time to point the irony of the situation.

“It is not without a measure of irony that the report is the work of one of the judges at the Lockerbie trial in the Scottish Court at Zeist; and that lack of Crown disclosure of material that might have assisted the defence is one of the principal grounds on which the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission decided that Mr Megrahi’s conviction might have been a miscarriage of justice,” the architect of the Lockerbie trial wrote on his website.